[amelius]

> I think our current systems is pretty good at figuring out how much value each person has created, and letting them capture a portion of it.

You are basically saying that Jeff Bezos has created more than 100x the value of, say, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Guido van Rossum, and Donald Knuth combined?

I think you forget how achieving near monopoly status is like gambling, and how much it depends on being first to market, and about convincing investors (for years Amazon has run on a loss, not sure how they do now).

[edanm]

"You are basically saying that Jeff Bezos has created more than 100x the value of, say, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Guido van Rossum, and Donald Knuth combined?"

An interesting point. I think most of the above people have created a lot of value as well. It's hard to quantify, so I think it's possible that Amazon has created more value.

However, I think it's far more likely that, while they created lots of value, they haven't captured most of it back. Arguably, that's because they didn't try to, which is a totally reasonable decision for them to have made.

[amelius]

> However, I think it's far more likely that, while they created lots of value, they haven't captured most of it back. Arguably, that's because they didn't try to, which is a totally reasonable decision for them to have made.

Yes, because going for money takes effort. This means that people who have hoarded a lot of money and wealth have spent time on capturing money and less time on producing value. Now we can ask, do we want to reward that kind of behavior by giving these people money and thus power, and wouldn't we get (i.e., select) better leaders if we assigned rewards based on true value?

[majani]

The way I see it, all those people are probably making good money($100k+ annually) and there is research that shows that above that point it's all gravy. In that sense the free market capitalism system works.